The contours of media study are increasingly understood in environmentalterms. This "spatial turn" recasts our ideas about the ways in which weencounter media objects, spaces and vectors. It is in the cross-sections ofspace and epistemology that we are articulating the conceptual catalyst ofthe "media field" and convening our conference. Media fields bring intocontact explorations of material spaces, unseen and transmittedatmospherics, and the languages and knowledges through which they areimagined, traversed, and constituted. Fields may be open grounds, areas onwhich games are played, bodies are screened, and militaries operate; fieldsinclude vast expanses of concrete, electricity, waste, or oil. Fields arebreeding grounds and graveyards, public and private; they are representedand replayed in bars, airplanes, and memories. Media fields comprisemulti-sensory and synaesthetic ways of knowing. Fields of media areresidual, anachronistic, or embedded in cultural products and histories. Th=estuff of everyday life=97garbage dumps, exhibitions, urban spaces, archives=,political campaigns, battlefields, and daydreams=97are also fields of force=swhere media are built, broadcast and worked through.

The scope of this conference is interdisciplinary, though we are especiallyinterested in works that reflects upon Media Studies itself as a dynamicfield of study. We also invite artistic projects for exhibition. You mightconsider the following questions:

--How do we sense, experience or know media fields or constellations? Howmight sounds, textures, temperatures, vibrations, odors, tastes, anddensities inform our understanding of disparate sites, from video games tothe Olympic Games?--How does site-specific fieldwork lead to different kinds of knowledgeabout film or media, spaces, and their histories? What are the stakes ofsuch shifts? What becomes of the text in the field?--How might attention to residue, disjuncture and media sedimentation infor=mmedia historiography, policy, or activism?--How are media flows not only smooth, transnational, and democratic butmade viscous by uneven access to wireless zones, copyright regulations,surveillance, waste and pollution, electronic warfare, and everydaymalfunctions that characterize mechanically reproduced media objects andprocesses?--How are places of leisure, commerce, intimacy, law, and study co-impacted=,reinvented or elided by media?--How do film and media artists, theorists, and policy-makers evoke fields?--How might the concept of the "field" generate interdisciplinary discussio=nof media spaces and epistemologies?

Please submit abstracts or project descriptions of 300 words or less toucsb.media.fields_at_gmail.com.

We encourage you to provide biographical information about yourself alongwith your abstract.Deadline for submission: December 18th 2006.